How Effective Is The Combination of Your Main

Product and Ancillary Texts?

By Tyrell Bibbiani

My ancillary text to support my artist Chloe’s music and music video consisted of a digipak and a magazine advert promoting the digipak. In a age of a rapid decline in CD’s due to online streaming services and illegal content, there’s still a niche audience who enjoys to purchase their music through physical CD copies. It could be argued

that people who now purchase digipaks purchase them as a collectible item due to it becoming a

rare thing that people do nowadays.

The Project:For this task, I had to create a music video which was my main product, along with an accompany of 2 ancillary texts, which consisted of a Digipak from my artist Chloe, along with a magazine advert. This would be my print media.

What is significant about these 2 print media products is that they compliment each other in terms of promoting one another. I felt as though it was appropriate to create this ancillary project as this was a common way in which the mainstream media chooses to promote their artists and remain successful. In spite of this, it isn’t always a successful technique as it must be made clear with ancillary texts that they intertextually reference each other and the artist so that the consumer can relate the ancillary texts to the artist’s music video that they had previously seen and, want to purchase that artist’s album.

Magazine Advert:The combination of my main music video product and ancillary texts was indeed effective. From the research

that I’d found, other similar artists like Ariana Grande’s digipak or Lady Gaga’s digipak would feature the star/artist clearly so that the audience can identify with who the artist is. So, I decided to also incorporate this convention into my own digipak magazine advert

as I felt as though this was a technique required to identify my artist as a young pop star. This magazine

advert also related to my digipak due to it incorporating both of the same dark grey colour

scheme and the light pastel pink colour scheme from the albums digipak, along with having the same

album cover to promote the album and having the same font as the album title, maintaining consistency

throughout. I also chose the 2 colours as they were very popular colours in other relating artists digipaks.

The Digipak:For my digipak as a piece of ancillary text, I felt as

though it was more than necessary to include multiple images of the artist so that the audience

would inevitably know she is the artist for this album/digipak and identify with her. I also decided to correlate the pictures with some key iconic elements from the music video so that the audience can notice these key elements from the video within the digipak shots and understand it is this artist. For example, in

the photo album and back cover tracklist, the dazzling christmas lights are present, along with the 2 CD

covers having the flickering gold lights, which relates and references the iconic scenes within the music video. After researching similar artists to ‘Chloe’,

artists like Ariana Grande, Adele and Alicia Keys all use a darker colour scheme and features the artist heavily, so I felt it was more than necessary to also incorporate this technique into my digipak with a darker grey colour scheme. With the picture that I

used for the photo album page inside of the digipak, this helped convey my artists characteristics due to

her playing with the dazzling lights and looking young, fun and innocent, which she is also seen doing the

same within some scenes in the music video, maintaining consistency.

Unique Selling Point (USP):Within main stream media, it is essential that they have a USP as there’re a lot of artists out there trying hard to break through into the mainstream. So it is essential that they have something unique to offer to the mass audience to get them noticed and engaged. This technique is vital in ancillary texts.

As part of the USP within my artists ancillary texts, I would say that the fact that my magazine poster features a scan-code square, this is a USP technique that my artist has to offer because the idea of this is that the audience can scan this on their phones and immediately the single ‘Tattooed Heart’ will automatically play. This is my magazines USP because most mainstream magazine posters doesn’t offer this feature, making it a unique and engaging technique with the mass audience.

Conclusively, I feel as though my ancillary text was indeed effective in terms of the combination of my music video and

digipak/magazine cover. This is because I kept the colour scheme essentially similar and had key images that referenced iconic scenes within the music video itself like the photo album – for example – helping keep the characteristic of my artist as young, fun, cheeky and innocent as she is smiling and playing with the dazzling lights, which she is also seen doing within

scenes from the music video. I essentially wanted to prioritise the idea of my artists image of innocence, youngness and

cheekiness consistent throughout both of my ancillary texts and music video.